12/7/14, 6:14 PMVladimir Nabokov’s Passionate Love Letters to Véra and His Affectionate Bestiary of Nicknames for Her | Brain Pickings

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Vladimir Nabokov’s Passionate LoveLetters to Véra and His AffectionateBestiary of Nicknames for Herby Maria Popova

“You are the only person I can talk with about the shade ofa cloud, about the song of a thought…”

Long before Vladimir Nabokov became a sage

of literature, Russia’s most prominent literary

émigré, and a man of widely revered strong

opinions, the most important event of his life

took place: 24-year-old Vladimir met 21-year-

old Véra. She would come to be not only his

great love and wife for the remaining half

century of his life, but also one of creative

history’s greatest sidekicks by acting as

Nabokov’s editor, assistant, administrator,

agent, archivist, chauffeur, researcher,

stenographer in four languages, and even his

bodyguard, famously carrying a small pistol in

her purse to protect her husband from

assassination after he became America’s most

famous and most scandalous living author.

So taken was Vladimir with Véra’s fierce intellect, her independence, her sense

of humor, and her love of literature — she had been following his work and

clipping his poems since she was nineteen and he twenty-two — that he wrote

his first poem for her after having spent mere hours in her company. But

nowhere did his all-consuming love and ebullient passion unfold with more

mesmerism than in his letters to her, which he began writing the day after they

met and continued until his final hours. They are now collected in the

magnificent tome Letters to Véra (public library) — a lifetime of spectacular

contributions to the canon of literary history’s greatest love letters, with

intensity and beauty of language rivaled only, perhaps, by the letters of Vita

Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis and those of Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera.

12/7/14, 6:14 PMVladimir Nabokov’s Passionate Love Letters to Véra and His Affectionate Bestiary of Nicknames for Her | Brain Pickings

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account, no need to sign upfor one – you can just useany credit or debit card.)

You can also become a one-time patron with a singledonation in any amount:

labors of love

Véra and Vladimir Nabokov, Montreaux, 1968 (Photograph: Philippe Halsman)

In July of 1923, a little more than two months after they met, Vladimir writes to

Véra:

I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being — well, understood,perhaps, — so unused to it, that in the very first minutes ofour meeting I thought: this is a joke… But then… And thereare things that are hard to talk about — you’ll rub off theirmarvelous pollen at the touch of a word… You are lovely…

[…]

Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the onlyperson I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about thesong of a thought — and about how, when I went out towork today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled atme with all of its seeds.

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[…]

See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.

By November, his love has only intensified:

How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden wonderfulhappiness, how much I am all yours — with all my memories,poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannotwrite a word without hearing how you will pronounce it —and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret— so sharp! — that we haven’t lived through it together —whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible —or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road — you seewhat I mean, my happiness?

And I know: I can’t tell you anything in words — and when Ido on the phone then it comes out completely wrong.Because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way wetalk with people long gone… in terms of purity and lightnessand spiritual precision… You can be bruised by an uglydiminutive — because you are so absolutely resonant — likeseawater, my lovely.

I swear — and the inkblot has nothing to do with it — I swearby all that’s dear to me, all I believe in — I swear that I havenever loved before as I love you, — with such tenderness —to the point of tears — and with such a sense of radiance.

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Vladimir's letter to Véra from November 8, 1923

After a charming aside professing that he had begun writing a poem for her on

the page but a “very inconvenient little tail got left” and he had no other paper on

which to start over, he continues in his characteristic spirit of earnest lyricism

with a sprinkle of disarming irreverence:

Most of all I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that I

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could give you that happiness — a sunny, simple happiness —and not an altogether common one…

I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to — it’s hardto explain — sounds flat — but that’s how it is. here, I’ll tellyou — with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire,songs, and valor — ten whole centuries, enormous andwinged, — full of knights riding up blazing hills — and legendsabout giants — and fierce Troys — and orange sails — andpirates — and poets. And this is not literature since if youreread carefully you will see that the knights have turned outto be fat.

But Nabokov makes clear that his feelings supersede the playful and expand into

the profound:

I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine lifewithout you…

I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably… Your eyes —which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrownback, you tell something funny — your eyes, your voice, lips,your shoulders — so light, sunny…

You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but asone comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have beenwaiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.

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must-reads

7 THINGS I LEARNED IN 7 YEARS OF

READING, WRITING, AND LIVING

HOW TO FIND YOUR PURPOSE AND DO

WHAT YOU LOVE

AN ANTIDOTE TO THE AGE OF ANXIETY:ALAN WATTS ON HAPPINESS AND HOW

TO LIVE WITH PRESENCE

Young Vladimir and Véra Nabokov by Thomas Doyle from 'The Who, the What,and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History.' Click image

for more.

In a letter from December 30 reminiscent of Lolita’s famous opening line, he

writes:

I love you very much. Love you in a bad way (don’t be angry,my happiness). Love you in a good way. Love your teeth…

I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes — closed — all thelittle tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your wholesoul from head to heels.

On the one hand, the half-century span of Vladimir’s love letters to Véra do

12/7/14, 6:14 PMVladimir Nabokov’s Passionate Love Letters to Véra and His Affectionate Bestiary of Nicknames for Her | Brain Pickings

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WHY TIME SLOWS DOWN WHEN WE’RE

AFRAID, SPEEDS UP AS WE AGE, AND

GETS WARPED WHILE ON VACATION

HOW TO BE ALONE: AN ANTIDOTE TOONE OF THE CENTRAL ANXIETIES AND

GREATEST PARADOXES OF OUR TIME

20-YEAR-OLD HUNTER S. THOMPSON’SSUPERB ADVICE ON HOW TO FIND YOUR

PURPOSE AND LIVE A MEANINGFUL LIFE

FAIL SAFE: DEBBIE MILLMAN ON COURAGE

AND THE CREATIVE LIFE

follow the neurobiological progression of love, moving from the passionate

attraction that defines the beginning of a romance to the deep, calmer

attachment of longtime love. On the other, however, they suggest that the very

act of writing love letters can help sustain the excitement and passion of a long-

term relationship, countering what Stendhal called the “crystallization” that

leads to disenchantment.

In fact, in 1926 — three years into the relationship — Nabokov, a lifelong lover

of wordplay, enlists an especially endearing strategy in infusing their

correspondence with passionate sparkle. While Véra is at a Swiss sanatorium to

regain weight she had lost due to anxiety and depression, Nabokov begins

addressing her by an increasingly amusing series of nicknames — no doubt in

part to amuse and cheer her up, in part to live up to his earlier assertion that she

“can be bruised by an ugly diminutive,” but also possibly as a language-lover’s

creative exercise for himself, a playful daily assignment of sorts. The traditional

terms of endearment opening his earlier letters — “my happiness,” “my love and

joy,” “my dear life” — give way to a loving bestiary of nicknames, inspired by

Vladimir and Véra’s shared love of animals.

Among his addresses to her that summer are “Sparrowling,” “Pussykins,”

“Mousie,” “Mymousch” (after the Russian for “monkey”), “Mothling,”

“Roosterkin,” “Long bird of paradise with the precious tail” (in a letter that closes

with “Goodbye, my heavenly, my long one, with the dazzling tail and the little

dachshund paws”), “Fire-Beastie,” and the especially wonderful “Pupuss,” which

Nabokov parenthetically explains as “a little cross between a puppy and a

kitten.”

In one letter from June of 1926, he opens by addressing Véra as “Mosquittle”

and, after reporting on how his work is going, gushes:

My tender Mosquittle, I love you. I love you, my superlativeMosquittle… My sweet creature… I love you. I am going tobed, Mosquittle… Good night, my darling, my tenderness, myhappiness.

In one letter that would no doubt have embarrassed the very private Véra (who

destroyed all of her own letters to Vladimir), he addresses her by “Skunky” — a

nickname itself far from offensive in the context of his already established

warmth of adoration and its menagerous manifestations, but one that may have

mortified Véra by the venereal basis for it that Nabokov’s naughty closing lines

imply:

Well, Skunky, good night. You will never guess (I am kissingyou) what exactly I am kissing.

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FAMOUS WRITERS ON THE CREATIVE

BENEFITS OF KEEPING A DIARY

HOW TO WORRY LESS ABOUT MONEY

FAMOUS WRITERS ON WRITING

WHAT IS LOVE? FAMOUS DEFINITIONS

FROM 400 YEARS OF LITERARY HISTORY

THE DAILY ROUTINES OF FAMOUS

WRITERS

But jest aside, it’s worth noting here what a true masterwork of linguistic

craftsmanship — in the true Virginia Woolfian sense — these letters are for

translator Olga Voronina. As if it weren’t daunting enough to translate the man

who reserved rather ungenerous words for translators, Nabokov’s love of

wordplay and his penchant for untranslatable words render his quirky animal-

inspired endearments especially challenging. But even his favorite standard

endearment lacks for an English equivalent. Voronina writes in the preface:

Most often, he prefers to call his wife dushen’ka, literally adiminutive of the Russian word dusha (“soul,” “psyche”). Itwould have been possible to translate this word as “darling”(our choice), “sweetheart” or “dearest” (options from adiscarded pile), had the writer not bedecked it with othertender adjectives: dorogaya (“dear”), lyubimaya (“beloved”),milaya (“lovely,” “sweet”), and bestsennaya (“priceless”). Weused “dear darling” a few times in spite of its sounding tooalliterative, resorted to “beloved darling” rarely, tried “sweetdarling” once or twice, and once (April 15, 1939) had to goalong with “My beloved and precious darling.” Unfortunately,even that baroque phrase does not fully convey the fretful andpersistent affection of the Russian “dushen’ka moya lyubimayai dragotsennaya,” with its one and a half times as manysyllables and with the adjectives coming cajolingly after thenoun.

In some cases, readers simply have to accept it as a giventhat Nabokov did not use his tenderness sparingly.

And that’s precisely the point — the true gift of these letters is how they immerse

the reader in a soul-warming bath of Nabokov’s tender and exuberant love, not

only for his wife but for literature and for life itself. What John Updike once

wrote on the jacket of Nabokov’s Selected Letters, 1940–1977 — “Dip in anywhere,

and delight follows. What a writer! And, really, what a basically reasonable and

decent man.” — is even more vibrantly true in Letters to Véra.

Complement with Nabokov on inspiration, censorship and solidarity, the

necessary qualities of a great storyteller, and the attributes of a good reader.

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ALBERT EINSTEIN ON THE SECRET TOLEARNING ANYTHING

CARL SAGAN ON SCIENCE AND

SPIRITUALITY

JOHN STEINBECK ON FALLING IN LOVE: A1958 LETTER

THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE: SENECA ON

BUSYNESS AND THE ART OF LIVING WIDE

RATHER THAN LIVING LONG

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Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read

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